Seljalandsfoss is the waterfall you can walk behind. The river drops about sixty metres off the old sea cliff in one narrow fall. The cliff is undercut, so there is a path that goes right around the back and you can walk behind the fall.
We took the seven o’clock ferry off the island this morning, and the weather had finally turned.
The day before we had seen the place through rain and low cloud, catching pieces of it between the fog. This morning, pulling out of the harbour, we got a nice look at the island. The cliffs and the bays came out clear, the green mountainsides above the town, and both volcanic cones standing plain against the sky, Helgafell and Eldfell, the old one and the young one. A few hours earlier we had stood at the foot of both and seen nothing at all.
It was a rainy morning, and we were in no hurry, so we woke up late and let the weather do what it wanted before heading into town. Even through the rain, you could see what a place this is. The island is tiny, only about five square miles, and yet packed into it are a coastline of cliffs and bays, high steep mountains, and two volcanoes. We caught glimpses of all of it between the low cloud, the sea one moment, a green mountainside the next, a dark volcanic cone the moment after. We could only wonder how fine this would look on a clear day, and we envied a little the people who get that day. But you take the weather you are given, and we set out to make the best of a rainy one.
For the last part of the day we drove east and west along Highway 1, on one of its finer stretches. The road runs under tall steep mountains here, with green valleys cut back into them, and the old sea cliffs are full of caves and dotted with turf houses, because people have been tucking shelter into this rock for a very long time. It is so beautiful that it deserves a post of its won.
Our next stop was Sólheimajökull, a tongue of glacier that reaches down off the big icecap of Mýrdalsjökull toward the road. It is one of the easiest glaciers in Iceland to walk up to.
Today we hiked up the Skógá valley, following the river past waterfall after waterfall. It is one of the great hikes of the south, and you can do as little or as much of it as you like. We did a piece of it.
Our third stop of the day was about the ground itself. We had spent the morning on people, the ones who may have come first and the ones who scratched a living out of turf and stone, and in the afternoon we went to look at the thing all of them were living on top of. The Lava Centre, in Hvolsvöllur, is an exhibition about the volcanoes that made this island and are still making it, and it was the right place to end a day of learning.
The best part was the film. It runs through the recent eruptions in Iceland, one after another, and seeing them listed with their years is genuinely hard to take in. Eyjafjallajökull in 2010, the one that stopped air travel across Europe. Grímsvötn in 2011, the largest at that volcano in a hundred and forty years. Holuhraun in 2014, a vast outpouring of lava in the highlands. And then the Reykjanes Peninsula, near Reykjavík, which had not erupted in about eight hundred and fifteen years and then woke up in 2021 at Fagradalsfjall, and has erupted again and again since, a whole series of eruptions right up to the present. The list just kept going. Sitting there watching the dates stack up, you understand that in Iceland an eruption is not a rare historical event. It is something that happens every few years, sometimes every few months.
One number from the exhibition stays with you more than the rest. Over the last five hundred years, this one small island has produced about a third of all the lava that has erupted anywhere on Earth. A third. A country of a few hundred thousand people, a speck in the North Atlantic, has poured out a third of the whole planet’s lava in that time. On average there has been a major eruption here every five years or so since the Middle Ages, and thirty-eight in the last hundred years alone. We wrote about why this island is so restless in our geology primer, and here was the number that puts it beyond doubt. This is not a country that has volcanoes. This is a country that is one.
Around the film the exhibition explains the how and why, and it is hands-on and well done. Iceland sits on the boundary between two tectonic plates that are pulling apart, and on top of a hot spot, a plume of heat rising from deep in the earth. That combination is why there is an island here at all, and why it is so restless, and it is the same thing we laid out in our geology primer. The displays walk you through magma, the different kinds of eruption, the earthquakes that come before, and the way the ground swells and cracks as molten rock forces its way up. It ties together a lot of what we had been seeing all over the country, the lava fields, the geothermal steam, the black sand, the calderas, back to the single engine underneath all of it.
Our second stop of the day took us from a mystery to something solid, from caves nobody can date to a farm you can walk through. Keldur is one of the oldest turf farms in Iceland, a little north of the road, and it is one of those places that shows you how people actually lived here, not the kings and the sagas but the ordinary hard business of getting through an Icelandic winter.
We spent today a little differently. We have been chasing landscapes lately, waterfalls, glaciers, and the big empty country of the highlands, but today we did not go out to look at scenery. We went out to learn things. We made three stops, all in the same corner near Hella, and all of them were about people and the earth rather than about a view.
The first was the Caves of Hella, which are a genuine mystery, and nobody can tell you for certain who made them or when. The second was Keldur, an old turf farm that shows how Icelanders actually lived, and how poor this country was until very recently. The third was the Lava Centre, which is about the ground itself, the volcanoes that are still erupting a short drive from where we sat. Three stops in one day, one thread through them. Not what the country looks like, but what it is, and what it has been through.
The weather is keeping us at the campground now, waiting on a ferry to the Westman Islands tomorrow that is not looking promising. So it was a good day to spend indoors and underground, learning.
We spent the rest of the day in Þjórsárdalur, the valley that runs up toward Hekla. It is one of the old settled valleys of the south, farmed since the saga age, and it holds a run of waterfalls fed by the river Fossá, a tributary of the Þjórsá. We had already been at the top of the country all week, in the highlands, and this was gentler ground, green and lower, the land beginning to soften on the way back down toward the coast. We had three falls in mind, one after another, and a late lunch at the end.
